Abstract
The Hong Kong Observatory (HKO) is planning to implement a fine-resolution Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) model for supporting the aviation weather applications at the Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA). This new NWP model system, called Aviation Model (AVM), is configured at a horizontal grid spacing of 600 m and 200 m. It is based on the WRF-ARW (Advance Research WRF) model that can have sufficient computation efficiency in order to produce hourly updated forecasts up to 9 hours ahead on a future high performance computer system with theoretical peak performance of around 10 TFLOPS. AVM will be nested inside the operational mesoscale NWP model of HKO with horizontal resolution of 2 km. In this paper, initial numerical experiment results in forecast of windshear events due to seabreeze and terrain effect are discussed. The simulation of sea-breeze-related windshear is quite successful, and the headwind change observed from flight data could be reproduced in the model forecast. Some impacts of physical processes on generating the fine-scale wind circulation and development of significant convection are illustrated. The paper also discusses the limitations in the current model setup and proposes methods for the future development of AVM.
Highlights
The Hong Kong International Airport [1] is located near the Lantau Island where airflow disturbances are generated due to the complex mountainous orography
Terrain-disrupted airflow could occur over and around Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA) when the prevailing winds are from east to southwest, in particular when strong-eastto-southeasterly winds blow over the airport in the spring under a stable boundary layer
Aviation Model (AVM) is designed to enhance the capability of Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) to support the aviation forecast in the Hong Kong Observatory
Summary
The Hong Kong International Airport [1] is located near the Lantau Island where airflow disturbances are generated due to the complex mountainous orography. In the first configuration of AVM using WRF-ARW version 3.2.1, two-dimensional deformation (“km opt” option in WRF) is chosen in order to provide consistent treatment with the selected planetary boundary layer process, as well as for estimate of computation resources required for realtime runs in hourly update basis It will be shown that while the choice of options in the previous paragraph can generally produce features of mesoscale circulation leading to a sea-breeze-induced windshear, they are yet inadequate to predict fine-scale variation of temperature and wind in forecasting localized wind convergence over HKIA, where the terrain effect of Lantau may contribute to the formation. The forecast speed of southwesterly wind could be strengthened using these choices such that the formations of local-scale anticyclone and wind convergence were suppressed
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